Texas pot farm found near border

Site is 25 miles from U.S.-Mexico border

By CHRISTOPHER
SHERMAN
the Associated Press

Published: August 23, 2014;Last modified: August 23, 2014 10:06PM

RAYMONDVILLE, Texas — On land once used to grow watermelons and grain, 8-foot tall marijuana plants swayed under a canopy of mesquite. White pipes and a pump diverted water from a canal, delivered to the 60-foot long rows by carefully excavated trenches.

Two acres of painstakingly cultivated marijuana thrived 25 miles from the U.S.-Mexico border, but on the Texas side.

Tons of marijuana cross the border daily from Mexico and large-scale grow operations are routinely found in the interior U.S. — authorities dismantled a massive one in the woods about 70 miles northeast of Houston last month that yielded 100,000 plants. But such a large crop so close to the border is unheard of, authorities said.

The 11,500-plant farm found earlier this month by authorities pursuing immigrants about 15 miles southwest of Raymondville bypassed the challenges of crossing the Rio Grande, but was still south of the Border Patrol’s interior highway checkpoints leading out of the Rio Grande Valley and far from its consumers.

“I haven’t seen anything like this,” Willacy County Sheriff Larry Spence said. “I’ve seen where guys would hollow out a place in the brush in their backyard or something close to their house, just a little bit. But this was quite spread out and dense and most of them were already pretty high.”

Last year, the Texas Domestic Cannabis Program, in which local and federal law enforcement agencies participate, eradicated 147,277 outdoor cultivated plants in 24 separate seizures.

The quality of the irrigation system impressed authorities, including Mark Dawson, the Homeland Security Investigations deputy special agent in charge of Laredo and the Rio Grande Valley, who said he hadn’t encountered something like this in his 17 years in the area.

“I guess we shouldn’t be surprised by how well it was done considering it’s the Rio Grande Valley and people down there are very experienced in irrigation and just growing (fruits and vegetables) in general,” Dawson said.